Adding an Automatic Activity

When you add an Automatic activity, you should take into account the following considerations.

Roles

You should add Automatic activities in automatic role lanes. You can add Automatic activities in user-defined roles but this does not add any information to the process. The engine runs Automatic activities without the user's intervention.

Transitions

You must connect an Automatic activity to the process flow using an inbound and an outbound transition. An error appears in the Problems View if the inbound or outbound transitions are missing.

Variables

The task associated to the Automatic activity can access the following types of variables:

predefined variables
instance variables
local variables

Argument Mapping

You may need to define an argument mapping when you implement an Automatic activity with a component or a procedure task.

When you implement an Automatic activity with a component task, the method you select might require input and output arguments.

In this case you need define the argument mapping for this task to map:

the instance variables in the process to the input arguments of the component method
the output arguments of the component method to the instance variables in the process

When you implement an Automatic activity with a procedure task the procedure you select might require might require input and output arguments.

In this case you need define the argument mapping for this task to map:

the instance variables in the process to the input arguments of the procedure
the output arguments of the procedure to the instance variables in the process